“Tell me the important information the writer tells about Chester Greenwood,” I asked 3rd student, Thomas*, after our study of the book Chester Greenwood’s Big Idea by Christine A. Economos. Economos’ book recounts the story of the inventor of the earmuffs and in a narrative style describes the process he went through to invent the earmuffs.
“He had big ears and he lived long ago in a small town,” replied Thomas with utmost seriousness. When asked if there was any more important information to remember he carefully paged through the book and answered, “He liked to skate.”
While these details added to the overall understanding of the book, they were merely that- just details. Why did this 3rd grader choose those 3 details to tell me when asked to retell the important information in the book? Why did he choose to leave out the invention of the earmuffs which was central to the entire story?
These are questions I have asked myself numerous times when working with young readers. Many children seem to miss the forest for the trees as the old expression goes. They get caught up in the details and miss the main message of the book they are reading. Helping children to recognize what is most important to remember from a book or piece of text seemed to be a logical next step in our strategy instruction.
Fourth grade teachers began a non-fiction unit at the beginning of our work on determining importance. Non-fiction is often the genre kids struggle with the most, especially when asked to determine which parts of the book are important and which are interesting details. We decided it was crucial to give students very practical, tangible strategies they could use to decide what parts of the text are more important than others.
Looking For Ideas that Repeat
One strategy we taught children to help them determine importance is to look for words or ideas that repeat. This required some teaching and modeling first as not every word that repeats is actually important. The word, the, for example, is repeated countless times in books but is not going to help signal importance. Also, some words might be different but the idea is the same which would be an example of something the repeats. Using some type of recording page, such as the one pictured on the right, can help children track the ideas that repeat and can allow them to analyze those repeating ideas when determining ideas that are important in the text.
If Thomas had recorded words or ideas that repeated when reading about Chester Greenwood, he would have noticed words like earmuffs, invention, and cold repeated often. Analyzing those repeating ideas would have helped Thomas to pull out the ideas that were important in the book.
Text Features
Another strategy we taught to the students was to use various text features as clues to what the author may believe is important. Headings, pictures, bolded words, and various other text features can signal importance. Authors use these features to help draw their reader into the important ideas. Helping students to recognize these text features can also help them to notice which ideas are important.
There were many text features in the book that Thomas had read. Various pictures and headings throughout the book provided clear clues as to what information is important.
Important Information vs. Interesting Details
A final strategy we taught in order to help students determine importance in text was differentiating between important information and interesting details. Just because a child finds a detail interesting, does not necessarily make it important to the overall message or theme of the book. Thomas, for example, found it interesting that Chester Greenwood had big ears. While this detail helped support the explanation of his invention of earmuffs, it wasn’t essential to the book. This strategy required some scaffolding. First we chose facts from the book we were reading and students had to decide if the fact was a piece of important information or just an interesting detail. This was quite difficult for the students as they seemed to think that every piece of information in a book must be important. Referring to the previous strategy of looking for ideas that repeat helped the children to determine if a detail was important information to the overall message of the book or merely a detail that helped support or provide interest in the topic.
We are eager to administer the post assessment for this strategy to see student growth. On the pre- assessment, students were unable to identify any clear strategies for determining importance in text. Responses included phrases such as, “I think really hard about it” or “All things in books are important” which clearly showed the inability of students to differentiate between important information and interesting details. We are hopeful that students now have more concrete strategies to use when determining importance and can apply those strategies to their independent reading.
Reflections on Reading 